Islamist Auto-Reform: Lessons from Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait

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Islamism and the state after the Arab uprisings: Between people power and state power

The authors would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for facilitating the research for this article through their support of the research network People Power versus State Power of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World.This paper examines the trajectories of different Islamist trends in the light of the Arab uprisings. It proposes a distinction between statist and non-statist Islamism to help understand the multiplicity of interactions between Islamists and the state, particularly after 2011. It is outlined how statist Islamists (Islamist parties principally) can contribute to the stabilization and democratization of the state when their interactions with other social and political actors facilitate consensus building in national politics. By contrast when these interactions are conflictual, it has a detrimental impact on both the statist Islamists, and the possibility of democratic politics at the national level. Non statist-Islamists (from quietist salafi to armed jihadi) who prioritize the religious community over national politics are directly impacted by the interactions between statist Islamists and the state, and generally tend to benefit from the failure to build a consensus over democratic national politics. Far more than nationally-grounded statist Islamists, non-statist Islamists shape and are shaped by the regional dynamics on the Arab uprisings and the international and transnational relations between the different countries and conflict areas of the Middle East. The Arab uprisings and their aftermath reshaped pre-existing national and international dynamics of confrontation and collaboration between Islamists and the state, and between statist and non-statists Islamists, for better (Tunisia) and for worse (Egypt).PostprintPeer reviewe

The rise and transformation of German political Catholicism (1848-1914) and Turkish political Islam (1970-2011)

While cultural assumptions of incommensurability lead to a dearth of cross-religious and cross-regional studies in the sociology of religion, such studies offer distinctive analytical opportunities for gaining empirically grounded general insights on religious politics. This article explores the rise and transformation of the German Center Party (1848–1914) and of Turkish Islamic parties (1970–2011) in comparative perspective. It is argued that the significant structural parallels in the trajectories of these religious parties stem from similarities in the policies of secularist actors and from common characteristics of the political structure in the two settings. The article concludes with a call for a relational approach that takes the political environment and interactions with secularist actors as constitutive of religious-political movements